Gerhard Weikum
Prof. Dr-Ing. Gerhard Weikum is a Research Director (and until Aug 2007, had also been the Managing Director) at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science (MPI) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the databases and information systems department. His current research interests include distributed information systems, P2P computing, database performance optimization (automatic tuning) and self-organization (autonomic computing), and intelligent organization and search of semistructured information. He is also the Dean of the International Max Planck Research School for Computer Science (IMPRS-CS).
Earlier he held positions at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, at MCC in Austin, Texas, and he was a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. He received his diploma and doctoral degrees from the University of Darmstadt, Germany.
He currently acts as the President of the VLDB Endowment, which organizes the yearly International Conference on Very Large Databases, one of the most reputable scientific conferences for researchers in the area of database research.
In 2005 the Association for Computing Machinery appointed Gerhard Weikum a Fellow. The appointment as a Fellow is one of the highest honors of the ACM, which is the most important and comprehensive umbrella association of Computer Science. Prof. Weikum has been honored for his groundbreaking research in the fields of databases and information systems, in particular for his contributions to improve the reliability and the performance of large-scale, distributed information systems. The induction of the ACM Fellows was held at the ACM Award Banquet on Saturday, May 20, 2006 in San Francisco.
The circle of fellows is dominated by outstanding researchers from US elite educational institutions, such as Stanford, Berkeley, or CMU. Since 1993, only seven German researchers have been appointed ACM Fellows.